Gangs of Eastern European human traffickers are forcing young women from EU countries into sham marriages with older Asian men in Glasgow, according to a BBC documentary.
Humans for Sale reveals how gang members lure vulnerable women to the UK with promises of well-paid employment, only to sell them to older men mostly from Pakistan and India once they arrive in Scotland.
The men are able to remain in Britain once they have married the victims, whose status as nationals from EU member states provides their new husbands with grounds on which to apply for permanent residency.
Once the women have been sold to aspiring grooms, they are kept in forced domestic servitude and sexually exploited by their husbands and the traffickers who brought them to the UK.
Angelika Molnar, who heads up Europol’s human trafficking unit, told the programme’s producers that people have become the second most lucrative criminal commodity after drugs.
The documentary’s makers identified one young woman from Slovakia who had been trafficked to Glasgow on three separate occasions.
Jim Laird, an expert on human trafficking, told the programme: “There’s a high number of victims from the Govanhill area, and that’s because there’s a clear link between Eastern European crime gangs, who have human trafficking as one of the things they do, and links with organised Asian crime gangs in Glasgow.
“So the Eastern European crime gangs will provide the victims and the Asian crime gangs here will provide the accommodation, which is why there is quite a lot of it in Govanhill.”
Laird said the criminals behind the illicit trade are rarely brought to justice as their victims are often too embarrassed or scared to go to the authorities.
“They’ve been sold a dream, believed it and came here, and when they found out what has happened to them, they just want to disappear as quietly as possible and go back to their own country,” Laird said.
Earlier this year, two women were jailed by a British court for coordinating a lucrative sham marriage plot that saw 26 Lithuanian women flown to the UK to wed men from countries including Sri Lanka, Pakistan, Nigeria and Nepal.
Valentina Kezeliene, 53, and her daughter Lina Kezelyte, 33, were found guilty of heading up the operation, which netted the gang they led some £335,000 (€399,000).
Sentencing the pair at the end of a trial at Croydon Crown Court, Judge Adam Hiddleston said: “You took advantage of people who may well have been, for all we know, extremely vulnerable.
“Misguided although they obviously were, they were prepared to pursue what was an illegal course in order to pursue the right to remain in this country, at great financial cost to themselves. This conspiracy exploited that vulnerability.”
